I was born in Chipping Sodbury General Hospital, which I think is appropriate
for someone who collects funny names. My sister, Di, was born just under
two years later, and she was the person who suffered my first efforts
at story-telling (I was much bigger than her and could hold her down).
Rabbits loomed large in our early story-telling sessions; we badly wanted
a rabbit.

Di can still remember me telling her a story in which she fell
down a rabbit hole and was fed strawberries by the rabbit family inside
it. Certainly the first story I ever wrote down (when I was five or six)
was about a rabbit called Rabbit. He got the measles and was visited
by his friends, including a giant bee called Miss Bee. And ever since
Rabbit and Miss Bee, I have wanted to be a writer, though I rarely told
anyone so. I was afraid they'd tell me I didn't have a hope.

We moved
house twice when I was growing up. The first move was from Yate (just
outside Bristol) to Winterbourne (on the other side of Bristol). A gang
of children including myself and my sister used to play together up and
down our street in Winterbourne. Two of the gang members were a brother
and sister whose surname was Potter. I always liked the name, but then
I was always keener on my friends' surnames than my own ('Rowling' is
pronounced like 'rolling', which used to lead to annoying children's
jokes about rolling pins).

When I was nine we moved to Tutshill near
Chepstow in the Forest of Dean. We were finally out in the countryside,
which had always been my parents' dream, both being Londoners, and my
sister and I spent most of our times wandering unsupervised across fields
and along the river Wye. The only fly in the ointment was the fact that
I hated my new school. It was a very small, very old-fashioned place
where the roll-top desks still had ink-wells. My new teacher, Mrs Morgan,
scared the life out of me. She gave me an arithmetic test on the very
first morning and after a huge effort I managed to get zero out of ten
- I had never done fractions before. So she sat me in the row of desks
on her far right. It took me a few days to realise I was in the 'stupid'
row. Mrs Morgan positioned everyone in the class according to how clever
she thought they were; the brightest sat on her left, and everyone she
thought was dim sat on the right. I was as far right as you could get
without sitting in the playground. By the end of the year, I had been
promoted to second left - but at a cost. Mrs Morgan made me swap seats
with my best friend, so that in one short walk across the room I became
clever but unpopular.

From Tutshill Primary I went to Wyedean Comprehensive. I heard the same
rumour about Wyedean that Harry hears from Dudley about Stonewall High (see
page of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone). But it wasn't true - at
least, it never happened to me. I was quiet, freckly, short-sighted and rubbish
at sports (I am the only person I know who managed to break their arm playing
netball). My favourite subject by far was English, but I quite liked languages
too. I used to tell my equally quiet and studious friends long serial stories
at lunch-times. They usually involved us all doing heroic and daring deeds
we certainly wouldn't have done in real life; we were all too swotty. I did
once have a fight with the toughest girl in my year, but I didn't have a
choice, she started hitting me and it was hit back or lie down and play dead.
For a few days I was quite famous because she hadn't managed to flatten me.
The truth was that my locker was right behind me and held me up. I spent
weeks afterwards peering nervously around corners in case she was waiting
to ambush me.

I became less quiet as I got older. For one thing I started
wearing contact lenses, which made me less scared of being hit in the
face. I wrote a lot in my teens, but I never showed any of it to my friends,
except for funny stories that again featured us all in thinly disguised
characters. I was made Head Girl in my final year, and I can only think
of two things I had to do; one was to show Lady Somebody around the school
fair, and the other was give an assembly to the whole school. I decided
to play them a record to cut down on the time I had to speak to them.
The record was scratched and played the same line of the song over and
over again until the Deputy Headmistress kicked it.

I went to Exeter
University straight after school, where I studied French. This was a
big mistake. I had listened too hard to my parents, who thought languages
would lead to a great career as a bilingual secretary. Unfortunately
I am one of the most disorganised people in the world and, as I later
proved, the worst secretary ever. All I ever liked about working in offices
was being able to type up stories on the computer when no-one was looking.
I was never paying much attention in meetings because I was usually scribbling
bits of my latest stories in the margins of the pad, or choosing excellent
names for the characters. This is a problem when you are supposed to
be taking the minutes of the meeting.

When I was twenty six I gave up
on offices completely and went abroad to teach English as a Foreign Language.
My students used to make jokes about my name; it was like being back
in Winterbourne, except that the Portuguese children said 'Rolling Stone'
instead of rolling pin. I loved teaching English, and as I worked afternoons
and evenings, I had mornings free for writing. This was particularly
good news as I had now started my third novel (the first two had been
abandoned when I realised how very bad they were). The new book was about
a boy who found out he was a wizard and was sent off to wizard school.
When I came back from Portugal half a suitcase was full of papers covered
with stories about Harry Potter. I came to live in Edinburgh with my
very small daughter, and set myself a deadline; I would finish the Harry
novel before starting work as a French teacher, and try to get it published.

It was a year after finishing the book before a publisher bought it.
The moment when I found out that Harry would be published was one of
the best of my life. By this time I was working as a French teacher and
being serenaded down the corridors with the first line of the theme from
Rawhide ('Rolling, rolling, rolling, keep those wagons rolling...').
A few months after 'Harry' was taken for publication in Britain, an American
publisher bought the rights for enough money to enable me to give up
teaching and write full time - my life's ambition.

And I've got a real
rabbit now. She is large and black and scratches me ferociously every
time I try and pick her up. Some things are best left in the imagination.